South Centre Inputs on 2025-2029 Work Program of the UN Tax Committee
25 September 2025
The United Nations (UN) Secretary-General appointed a new Membership of the UN Tax Committee to hold office from 2025-2029. This includes Members nominated by Brazil, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, India, Jamaica, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone (all of them are members States of the South Centre). The Committee will hold its first meeting in October in Geneva, Switzerland, and will decide, among other things, the issues they should work on during the tenure of the new members. The Committee also issued a call for inputs to stakeholders to help shape this agenda.
To ensure that the four-year agenda contains topics of importance to South Centre Member States and developing countries more generally, the South Centre made a submission to the Committee which is reproduced below.
The Role of the Human Rights Council in Advancing the Right to Health: From Guidance to Implementation
Side Event to the 60th Session of the UN Human Rights Council
Organized by the South Centre
Date & Time: 25 September 2025, 15h00-16h00
Venue: Room Concordia 1, Palais des Nations, Geneva
This side event to the 60th session of the Human Rights Council is convened to discuss the critical implementation gap at domestic level of oversight over state obligations related to health, placing the voices and priorities of the Global South at the center of the discourse to chart a course for a more effective approach to advancing the right to health for all.
Bandung and Beyond: Reclaiming Collective Agency through Triangular Cooperation
By Amitabh Mattoo
Seventy years after the 1955 Bandung Conference, the Global South finds itself once again at a moment of moral and geopolitical reckoning. This article argues that Bandung must be reimagined not as a commemorative episode, but as an evolving framework of collective agency. By placing triangular cooperation at its centre, and by advancing new epistemic and institutional partnerships, we can craft a more inclusive, ethical, and action-oriented multilateralism for the 21st century.
Seven Decades After Bandung: The evolving landscape for South-South and Triangular Cooperation
By Danish
Seven decades after the landmark Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, its outcomes and principles continue to guide South-South and Triangular Cooperation (SSTrC) among the nations of the global South. Despite the current challenges facing global governance, multilateralism and international development cooperation, the Bandung Principles or Dasa sila remain an effective framework for developing countries to work collectively towards achieving peace, economic growth and sustainable development, and creating a democratic and equitable global order fit for the current moment which ensures that no one is left behind. Highlighting the legacy and continued relevance of the Spirit of Bandung for developing countries, this paper looks at some of the important elements that are contributing to the changing landscape for SSTrC; its opportunities, challenges and future trajectories; and how SSTrC could be strengthened at the national, regional and multilateral level for realizing sustainable development in the global South.
Financial Support for Civil Society Advocacy during World Antimicrobial Resistance Awareness Week (WAAW) 2025
The South Centre invites applications from civil society organizations and research institutions from developing countries for limited financial funding (maximum 2000 USD) to design and launch or extend impactful advocacy campaigns that engage local government, communities, stakeholders and media to address antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
The scope of the campaigns can be human health, the human-animal interface, use of antimicrobials in food production systems, the role of the environment in the transmission and spread of AMR.
The campaigns should take place during the World AMR Awareness Week 2025. The theme for the World AMR Awareness Week (WAAW) 2025 is “Act Now: Protect Our Present, Secure Our Future”. This year’s WAAW will take place from 18–24 November 2025.
To apply for funding, please complete the application form below and send it to Ms. Caroline Ngome Eneme at ngomeeneme@southcentre.int by 20 September 2025. In case you need more space to provide information on your project, please attach it in a separate document. Any questions about this call can also be sent to this email address.
The selection result will be announced by 15 October 2025.
Mapping Africa’s Digital Trade: AfCFTA, JSI & AU AI Strategy
WTO Public Forum Working Session 49
Organizer: South Centre
18 September 202510:45-12:00 Room S3
This session explores how Africa is shaping its digital trade future through the AfCFTA Digital Trade Protocol, engagement in WTO e-commerce discussions, and the Continental Artificial Intelligence Strategy. It will examine the region’s priorities on data governance, local value creation, and inclusive digital markets, while assessing risks of fragmentation across regimes. Speakers will consider how African countries can assert greater agency in global digital rulemaking and align trade, technology, and development strategies. The session offers a forward-looking perspective on what a fair and inclusive global digital trade architecture could look like from an African and Global South perspective.
WTO Reform: Rewriting Trade History – The United States as Architect and Beneficiary of the Multilateral Trading System
A Working Paper on Elements of WTO Reform, 1 September 2025
By Vahini Naidu, Trade for Development Programme, South Centre
This paper examines the revisionist trade narrative advanced by the United States, which portrays multilateral rules as disadvantageous and seeks to justify unilateral tariffs and coercive bilateral arrangements. It demonstrates that the principles of non-discrimination and reciprocity pre-date Bretton Woods and were embedded in the multilateral system through U.S. initiatives from the 1930s through the creation of GATT in 1947. Far from being disadvantaged, the U.S. has consistently shaped and benefitted from the system, including through the Uruguay Round’s expansion of enforceable rules on services, intellectual property, and investment. The analysis shows that the shift toward what has been termed the “Turnberry system” risks fragmenting global markets, eroding the MFN principle, and deepening structural asymmetries that leave developing countries more vulnerable to exclusion. By correcting historical records, the paper underscores the importance of defending multilateral guarantees of equal treatment while building institutional capacity and strategic coordination to better safeguard development priorities in an increasingly contested global order.
Global South’s Aspirations for Inclusive Human Development
By Sudheendra Kulkarni
China’s epoch-changing success in complete eradication of extreme poverty by the end of 2020 has many lessons for other developing countries, including India, that still have a large burden of poverty. India and China, as the only two nations with populations over one billion, should expand all-round cooperation based on mutual learning. Without any doubt, this will prove highly beneficial to inclusive Global Development.
Submission on the Work Programme of the High-Level Champions and the Marrakech Partnership (CHLC/MP) 2025 and the Global Climate Action Agenda
South Centre
August 2025
Voluntary action is no longer enough. The South Centre submission to the UNFCCC calls for transforming the climate agenda to ensure true inclusivity, tackle harmful lobbying, and create accountability mechanisms and policy gaps.
Reflections on Global Development in Times of Crisis: Arguments in Favour of an Alternate Development Paradigm
By K. Seeta Prabhu
The multiple interlinked and interacting crises that the world faces today is of unprecedented range and magnitude, halting progress and causing even a reversal in crucial Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) relating to well-being. The current situation of an unequal, unstable and unsustainable world that is fragile and leaves people vulnerable on multiple counts, is due to the policy decisions taken by national governments since the post second World War period that gave priority to economic growth and neglected both intra and inter-generational distributional issues. Economic growth was considered the end instead of the means it was meant to be and ‘being well-off’ was equated with ‘well- being’. The tendency to adopt a ‘Business as Usual’ approach is not an option as empirical analysis indicates that such an approach would lead to global warming that is 3–5 degrees Celsius above pre–industrial levels, which threatens the very existence of the planet. Earlier attempts at reorienting the current development paradigm towards equity and sustainability have not been successful, as exemplified by vaccine distribution during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the limited success of concepts such as inclusive growth and green growth. Often, the elements infusing equity have been add-ons to an inequitable growth process and are more in the nature of token gestures rather than serious efforts at change.
The combined human development and Lifestyle for Environment (LiFE) approach that is proposed in this paper is promising as it has the ethical values of equity and sustainability at its core, propagates the notion of the ‘common good’ and thereby fosters responsible consumption and production. It is also people-centric and builds on indigenous knowledge and agency. The ushering in of this transformational development paradigm will require the forging of a new social contract between the State and Society. Additionally, the developed countries must recognise their responsibility towards the environment and extend support and cooperation to developing countries in the pursuit of a common agenda of attaining a more equal and sustainable world. Increased flow of financial resources to developing countries as well as devising new financing mechanisms enhancing the equity and efficiency dimensions of financing for human development so as to accelerate progress on the SDGs will also be of paramount importance.
Alternative Modality for Landmark Decision of UN Convention on Biodiversity: Bounded Openness over Natural Information
By Joseph Henry Vogel
The Secretariat of the 1993 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity requested Submissions of Views on “possible additional modalities for the fair and equitable sharing of benefits from the use of digital sequence information on genetic resources”. Bounded Openness over Natural Information is an alternative that could supplant the modalities of Decision 16/2 and achieve fairness, equity and efficiency.
The Importance of Balanced Intellectual Property Systems for Patients’ Access to Medicines: An Analysis
By Archana Jatkar and Nicolás Tascón
Access to safe, effective, cost-effective, and quality-assured medicines is fundamental from a patients’ perspective. The International Generic and Biosimilar Medicines Association (IGBA) recently released a reporthighlighting the critical balance between innovation, competition, and timely access to medicines. This article delves into the key findings of IGBA’s report, their implications on patient access to medicines and national healthcare budgets, and the IGBA’s recommendations for improving the global pharmaceutical landscape.
